Nine and a half years ago, I started this blog with a post titled, simply, This blog. One thousand, two hundred and forty-three posts later — roughly two per week — I’m ending it. It has been a great ride.

I’ve been a reporter for 41 years. When I began, we didn’t have blogs, or Twitter or Facebook, or the Internet or even desktop computers. We wrote stories on machines known as “typewriters.” Somehow we managed.

We’re better off now.

There are those who argue that the Internet has been bad for journalism. I can’t agree. To be sure, online media have taken readers and advertisers away from newspapers and magazines. Local newspapers have been hollowed out and, as a result, local news coverage has suffered terribly. But when it comes to national or international news, business reporting, sports news, movie or TV or book reviews, opinion writing and just about everything else, there’s more good journalism available today than ever before.

The Internet has transformed my professional life. (It has been “berry, berry good to me,” in the words of Chico Escuela.) Twenty years ago, as part of my audition for a job at FORTUNE magazine, I wrote a story about what was then called ESPN Sportzone. (With 140,000 users a day, it was then “one of the most popular destinations on the Web, the multimedia portion of the Internet that is experiencing hypergrowth.”) My first FORTUNE cover story profiled Steve Case and America Online. FORTUNE made so much money during the tech bubble that Time Inc. once sent a bunch of editors and reporters to Hawaii for an offsite. Those were the days.

Since 2006, when I started this blog, I’ve been able to connect with readers as never before. Being a “publisher” was heady stuff. For better or worse, I was liberated from editors for the first time in my reporting career.

You might wonder which have been my most popular posts. Two were personal. In December 2008, I wrote a post headlined The recession hits home. I’d just lost my staff position at FORTUNE, which kept me on part-time with a contract. The blog post generated all kinds of offers, as well as personal support at a time when I needed it.

I wrote Edgar Gunther, RIP about my father after he died in 2009. Writing it was cathartic. His career ended before the Internet era, so it’s essentially the only online record of his life. Comments from his friends and colleagues arrived for years afterwards.

Why I am saying goodbye now? Not because I’m tired of blogging. But after 20 years of reporting about business, I’m ready to try something new. While I expect to write occasionally about business and sustainability, I’ve given up my position as editor at large of Guardian Sustainable Business US.

Going forward, I expect to spend most of my time reporting on foundations and nonprofits, with a focus on their effectiveness. I’ll also be writing about global poverty, animal welfare and sustainable/impact investing. I’ll be freelancing and writing weekly for a blog, Nonprofit Chronicles, that I began last spring. I invite you to subscribe to the blog here and to “like” Nonprofit Chronicles on Facebook.

Thank you for giving me a precious gift — your time and attention — for these past nine years.

Have you heard? Monsanto is going on trial in The Hague for “crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide.” The Organic Consumers Association had the story:

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), IFOAM International Organics, Navdanya, Regeneration International (RI), and Millions Against Monsanto, joined by dozens of global food, farming and environmental justice groups announced today that they will put Monsanto MON (NYSE), a US-based transnational corporation, on trial for crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide, in The Hague, Netherlands, next year on World Food Day, October 16, 2016.

The steering committee organizing this citizens tribunal — which has nothing to do with the International Court of Justice, a real court located in the Hague — includes Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association, the activist Vandana Shiva and scientist Gilles-Eric Seralini, all of them unrelenting critics of genetic engineering who allegations bear only a loose resemblance to the facts. (See this and this and this.) Somehow I don’t think this trial will end well for Monsanto.

I bring this up because I recently interviewed Hugh Grant, the chief executive of Monsanto, about climate change and GMOs for a story in the Guardian. He told me, among other things, that he wishes the debate about genetic engineering would become more science-based and less polarized. (Good luck with that.) Fortunately, Monsanto has retained the trust of thousands of corn and soy farmers who rely on its seeds and crop protection products.

My story describes how Monsanto now intends to work farmers to help them farm in more climate-friendly ways, and to help them adapt to the threat of climate change. Here’s how it begins:

You have an easy job,” I tell Hugh Grant, the CEO of Monsanto, as we sit down at the W Hotel in New York City. He looks puzzled, so I explain: “I just read on the Internet that Monsanto controls the world’s food supply.”

Success hasn’t been easy: the agriculture business is competitive, and farmers are constantly looking for ways to increase yields, says Grant, who has been with Monsanto for 34 years. “We have to win their business every year.”

It’s true that Monsanto is a big player in the ag biz, but notice that most farmers choose not to buy its seeds. It’s hardly in control of anything.

Whether or not they are customers of Monsanto, US farmers are incredibly productive. While some critics question whether the US should export its agricultural methods to poor countries, Grant notes that

while US corn farmers generate yields of 150 to 160 bushels per acre, farmers in Brazil, Mexico and India get about 100 bushels per acre and those in Africa produce only about 20 bushels. There’s enormous room for improvement in Africa, he says.

I wonder what, exactly, the anti-GMO forces who are going to spend their time and money to put Monsanto “on trial” intend to do for farmers in Africa.

More to the point, I wonder why the anti-GMO forces believe they are in a better position than farmers to know what’s good for them. In a competitive marketplace, where there are no obvious information asymmetries, farmers every year choose to do business with Monsanto. Are they misguided?

Like all companies, Monsanto has made mistakes. Perhaps more than its share. But I honestly don’t understand why this company is so maligned.

I wish I could be optimistic about COP21, the climate negotiations coming to an end in Paris. I can’t. Even if the world’s countries keep their promises — known, in the mind-numbing argot of the UN as Intended Nationally Determined Commitments — the climate reductions they are promising don’t go far enough. As Coral Davenport reported in The Times as the talks got underway:

Together the more than 170 national plans for Paris would still allow the planet to warm by as much as 6 degrees, according to several independent and academic analyses. Scientists say that that level of warming is still likely to cause food shortages and widespread extinctions of plant and animal life.

These unenforceable “commitments” are, at best, a step in the right direction and, at worse, a way for government leaders to try to fool their citizens and, perhaps, themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing.

One reason for my skepticism is that these voluntary efforts resemble the voluntary measures taken by companies to curb their carbon emissions for the past decade or so. Even the most mainstream and business-friendly green groups are discouraged by the scale of those efforts, so they have launched an initiative called Science Based Targets to try to persuade big companies to do better.

In a story headlined Where’s the Science?, I wrote big companies and their climate targets the other day in Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how the story begins:

As the UN climate meetings in Paris come to an end this week, diplomats from around the world are under pressure to reach an agreement that would reflect the plans they presented to cut their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. These voluntary plans include targets and starting points set by each government. The US vows to cut emissions by 26% below 2005 levels by 2025; the EU by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030; and China will starting reducing in 2030.

It hasn’t worked. Emissions from the world’s 500 largest businesses are rising,according to Thomson Reuters. Scientists say emissions must fall to avoid catastrophic climate risks.

Science Based Targets intends to push companies to do better. It’s an initiative formed by the World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund, the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) and the UN Global Compact – business-friendly, mainstream organizations that are frustrated by the arbitrary and unscientific nature of corporate climate targets.

Voluntary carbon targets–for companies or countries–are not likely to get us where we need to go, I’m afraid. They make about as much sense as voluntary speed limits or tax rates.

A company that makes drones for humanitarian purposes, another that makes plant-based egg substitutes and still another that wants to mine asteroids for precious minerals would not seem to have much in common. All belong to the portfolio of an unusual venture capital fund called the OS Fund.

I wrote about the OS Fund and its founder, Bryan Johnson, last week for Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how the story begins:

Small changes, it’s often said, add up to huge results. But don’t tell Bryan Johnson that.

The 38-year-old technology investor has no interest in incremental improvements. His venture capital firm, the OS Fund, backs entrepreneurs who are working towards “quantum-leap discoveries” that promise to rewrite “the operating system of life”.

The metaphor is intentional. “Software allows us to do anything we want,” Johnson said over coffee in suburban Virginia. “We have this remarkable ability to create any kind of world we can imagine.”

Software can’t rewrite the rules of physics, but Johnson does have a point. “With new tools such as 3D printing, genomics, machine intelligence, software, synthetic biology and others, we can now make in days, weeks or months things that previous innovators couldn’t possibly create in a lifetime,” Johnson wrote when he unveiled the OS Fund last October. “Where DaVinci could sketch, today we can build.”

Interesting guy. Unassuming, too. We met at a Starbucks in McLean, Va., and talked for about an hour. Bryan was raised as a Mormon, and a missionary trip that he took to Ecuador seems to have sparked in him a desire to try to attack some of the world’s biggest problems. You can read the rest of the story here.

It’d be nice if the world could be powered with zero-carbon energy but wishing it so doesn’t make it so. We’re going to be burning fossil fuels, for better or worse–actually, for better and worse–for many years. So we need to figure out how to deal with CO2 emissions from burning coal, natural gas and oil..

The XPrize Foundation this week announced a $20 million prize for recycling CO2, and I covered the story for the Guardian. Here’s how my story begins:

With the announcement Tuesday of its new $20m Carbon XPrize, the non-profit XPrize Foundation is taking a middle ground – launching a competition to find new uses for carbon dioxide (CO2) , the greenhouse gas emitted by coal and natural gas plants. It’s intended to allow the continued burning of fossil fuels while reducing or eliminating their climate impact.

“How do we take that CO2 that’s coming from power plant emissions, and incentivize teams to create novel products?” said Paul Bunje, senior scientist for energy and the environment at the XPrize Foundation. “The CO2 could be turned from a waste into a valuable product.”

The award, not surprisingly, is sponsored by fossil fuel interests: NRG Energy, a coal-burning utility as well as a strong advocate for solar and wind power, and the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), a coalition of companies that extract oil from Alberta’s oil sands, which are a mixture of sand, water, clay and heavy oil.

With roots in religious communities and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, SRI funds have long shunned investments in tobacco, alcohol, guns and (low-carbon) nuclear power. Much as I admire the pioneers of the field–folks like Amy Domini and Wayne Silby–this never made sense to me, particularly after I attended the SRI industry’s annual confab in the Rockies and found that where ample quantities of wine and beer were poured.

Nor, for the most part, did the socially responsible investment firms have the resources that would enable them to do the deep research needed to identify those companies that are committed to socially and environmentally sound practices, and those who are not.

That may–may–be changing.

Hugh Lawson of Goldman Sachs

I say that because several big Wall Street banks–Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch–are becoming increasingly interested in SRI which, interestingly, has been rebranded “sustainable, responsible and impact” investing by US SIF, an industry group. Today in the Guardian, I wrote about Goldman’s new head of environmental, social and governance (ESG), Hugh Lawson. Here’s how the story begins:

Wall Street’s big banks are becoming increasingly interested in sustainable investing. The most recent convert is Goldman Sachs: in June, it named Hugh Lawson, a partner and managing director, as its global head of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing. This move was part of a larger trend: a month later, Goldman acquired Imprint Capital, a boutique investment firm that seeks measurable social and environmental impacts on top of financial returns.

Those clients include public pension funds, insurance companies, universities and foundations that want their investments to take social and environmental issues into account. Given the size and scope of these large institutional investors, it’s not surprising that some of Wall Street’s major players are getting involved: Goldman and its rivals, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, are following the money, as they always do.

In addition to attracting big clients, the sustainable investing initiatives being led by Lawson and others – including Audrey Choi, who leads Morgan Stanley’s global sustainable finance group, and Andy Sieg, head of global wealth and retirement solutions for Merrill Lynch – have the potential to steer more capital into investments that promote corporate sustainability. “Clients are telling us that they want their portfolios to reflect their values and help improve the world they live in,” Sieg has said.

When we met a couple of weeks ago, Lawson told me that he became interested in sustainable investing while serving as a trustee of the investment committee at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which divested from fossil fuels last year. Lawson analyzed the relationship between divestment and financial returns, and came to believe that eliminating fossil fuel holdings from the fund’s $857m portfolio would not necessarily limit returns or increase risk.

What’s promising about about all this is that Goldman and its rivals intend to bring more rigor, sophistication and scale to the field of sustainable investing. As an example, Lawson told me that investment advisors could construct a portfolio that overweights companies that are carbon-efficient and underweights those that are high emitters. This could reward companies with the most favorable social and environmental profiles; over time, it might even generate above-market returns. In any event, bringing more resources and brainpower to sustainable investing is almost surely going to be a good thing.

IKEA plans to power itself with 100 percent renewable energy while rivals who buy cheaper, coal-fired electricity can gain a competitive edge.

These examples point to a couple of obvious problems with voluntary corporate-responsibility initiatives. First, there’s no assurance that such initiatives are going to solve whatever problem it is that they are targeting; in fact, they won’t unless they are universally adopted or codified into law. Second, unless and until those companies that lead the way are rewarded by consumers (unlikely) or their workers (more probable), the leading companies can find themselves at a disadvantage.

This week at Guardian Sustainable Business, I look at the contrast between Best Buy, a corporate-responsibility leader, particularly around recycling, and Amazon.com, which until recently has been a CSR laggard.

When my wife’s printer recently went on the fritz, she ordered a new one from Amazon, which arrived two days later. I took the broken printer to Best Buy, which offers free and easy recycling of electronics.

Is this a problem for Best Buy, I wondered? Collecting and recycling electronics costs money, and Best Buy’s program is open to anyone with electronic waste, from any manufacturer. No purchase necessary.

By contrast, Amazon, a key competitor – and the seller of both our old and new printers – offers little in the way of recycling and more broadly has been a laggard when it comes to corporate responsibility.

Electronics recycling is challenging because the cost of properly disposing of e-waste – particularly heavy, old-fashioned TVs – is greater than the value of the materials. Global commodity prices are low.

“It’s not quite break-even,” said Alexis Ludwig-Vogen, Best Buy’s director of corporate responsibility, of the program. This means, to put it bluntly, that Best Buy is collecting trash generated by Amazon, Walmart and other competitors.

The dynamic between Best Buy and its competitors is analogous to what economists call a free rider problem. Best Buy is providing what could be considered public goods, free recycling, at its own expense, and Amazon, Walmart and, for that matter, all the rest of us benefit. Electronics make up the fastest-growing waste stream on the planet, and recycling preserves metals and plastics, and reduces pressures on landfills. Efforts like Best Buy’s also help fend off regulation, which could benefit other companies.

Aside from, perhaps, GMOs, few topics in the sustainable business arena are as emotional as pets. When my friend Erik Assadourian wrote a well-researched story for the Guardian last year asking whether pets are bad for the environment, he was assailed in the comments as a a “dumbass,” an “animal hater” and “an overpaid media commentator.” (The last allegation, I can assure you, is false.) It goes without saying that people love their pets. “My dogs are my family,” one commenter said. And we certainly can’t blame pets for the world’s pollution problems. As Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States, a pet owner and a defender of all four-legged creatures, once said, dogs and cats “aren’t driving to work.”

True enough. But dogs and cats have environmental impacts. They make waste. They’re eat, and many are overfed. They consume resources, including plastic toys and costly health care. And while, yes, they provide companionship, improve health and get us to spend more time outdoors meeting people, as Erik noted, couldn’t all those things be provided just as well by, er, people? Do we really need dogs to get us to talk a walk around the neighborhood.

When I recently revisited the topic for the Guardian, focusing this time on the impact of pet food, an editor told me that my story wasn’t good enough to run. I learned long ago not to argue with editors–they’re powerful and, occasionally, right–so I took the story to the Worldwatch Institute, where Erik works, and it then made its way to GreenBiz.

The story is anything but an assault on pets. Instead, it’s an effort to show how the giant food company Mars, which makes more pet food than candy bars, is trying to reduce its environmental impact, focusing on cat food, seafood and the oceans. Here’s how the story begins:

The United States is home to 85.8 million cats and 77.8 million dogs. They all have to eat. And that’s a problem — particularly when owners decide to feed their pets as if they were people.

The environmental impact of pet food is big, although no one knows just how big. Like the rest of us, dogs and cats consume meat, fish, corn and wheat, thus creating pressures on the global food system, along with carbon emissions as the food is manufactured and transported.

What we do know is that pet food is big business, generating about $22 billion in sales a year, industry groups estimate.

Much could be done to “green” pet foods — dogs and cats are getting more meat and fish than they need, for starters — but the industry is just starting to grapple with its sustainability issues.

Privately held Mars is leading the way, at least when compared to its big rivals. Better known for chocolate bars and M&Ms, Mars is the world’s biggest pet food company: Mars Pet Care has revenues estimated at $17 billion, employs 39,000 people, operates about 70 factories and owns the Pedigree, Whiskas, Nutro, Sheba, Cesar, Royal Canin and Iams brands.

The story goes on to say that Mars has

promised to buy fish only from fisheries or fish farms that are certified as sustainable by third parties. Importantly, Mars also said it would replace all wild catch whole fish and fish fillet with either by-products or farmed fish — so that demand for pet food does not compete directly with food that could be served to people.

That’s a step in the right direction. Other pet food companies, including Nestle and J.M. Smucker, have yet to follow. You can read the rest of my story here.

There was more bad news this week for pet owners. Did you happen to see the massive New York Times series about slavery at sea? The headline reads Sea Slaves: The Human Misery that Feeds Pets and Livestock. In four long stories, The Times reports on harsh, inhumane, just plain awful way that people are treated in the Thai fishing industry, which is being driven by “an insatiable global demand for seafood even as fishing stocks are depleted.”

Here’s where pets come in:

The United States is the biggest customer of Thai fish, and pet food is among the fastest growing exports from Thailand, more than doubling since 2009 and last year totaling more than $190 million. The average pet cat in the United States eats 30 pounds of fish per year, about double that of a typical American.

Though there is growing pressure from Americans and other Western consumers for more accountability in seafood companies’ supply chains to ensure against illegal fishing and contaminated or counterfeit fish, virtually no attention has focused on the labor that supplies the seafood that people eat, much less the fish that is fed to animals.

“How fast do their pets eat what’s put in front of them, and are there whole meat chunks in that meal?” asked Giovanni M. Turchini, an environmental professor at Deakin University in Australia who studies the global fish markets. “These are the factors that pet owners most focus on.”

So should you give up your cats and dogs? Not necessarily. But small pets are better than big ones. And if you feed them fish and meat, you might want to go vegetarian more often, to offset their impact.

Despite all of the sound and fury set off by the campaign to divest fossil fuels — and there has been plenty — Bill McKibben, 350.org and their allies have persuaded only a handful of big institutions to sell off the coal, oil and gas holdings in their endowments. They’ve had little or no direct effect on publicly-traded oil companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil, and none on the government-owned oil companies of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Iraq that are shielded from chants of rag-tag college students telling them to “leave it in the ground.”

That said, by any measure other than financial, the divestment campaign has been a big success.

Nestled in Vermont’s bucolic Champlain valley, Middlebury College is a seedbed of environmental activism. Middlebury students started 350.org, the environmental organization that is fighting climate change and coordinating the global campaign for fossil-fuel divestment. Bill McKibben, the writer and environmentalist who is spearheading the campaign, has taught there since 2001. Yet Middlebury has declined to sell the oil, gas, and coal company holdings in its $1 billion endowment.

McKibben’s alma mater, Harvard University — which has a $36 billion endowment, the largest of any university — also has decided not to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies. Indeed, virtually all of the United States’ wealthiest universities, foundations, and public pension funds have resisted pressures to sell their stakes in fossil fuel companies. And while a handful of big institutional investors — Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Stanford University, and AXA, a French insurance company — have pledged to sell some of their coal investments, coal companies account for less than 1 percent of the value of publicly traded stocks and an even smaller sliver of endowments.

Put simply, the divestment movement is not even a blip on the world’s capital markets.

Why? Well, you can read the rest of the story to find out, but in essence, the divestment campaign has in short order built a vibrant global climate movement, which is exactly what McKibben and his allies set out to do nearly three years ago. (See Do the Math: Bill McKibben takes on big oil, my 2012 interview with him.) Hundreds of US college campuses, cities and foundations have been forced to respond to divestment demands. They’ve debated and analyzed the climate threat. And, as the story explains, even when institutions decide not to divest — often for good reason, I might add — they almost always do something. What’s more, the campaign has spread wildly, er, widely to Europe and Asia, thanks to social media, and it has taken on a life of its own, as a decentralized but loosely connected series of campaigns that are gathering momentum.

As a practical matter, divestment has re-opened an important conversation about whether and how institutions and individuals are investing with their values in mind. Last week, writing on my other blog, Nonprofit Chronicles, I asked: Why won’t foundations divest fossil fuels? Most of the big ones have not, but they are all talking about “impact investing,” that is, aligning more of their endowment money with their programming goals. Some of that money is flowing to climate solutions including renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.And it would not surprise me to see one or two big foundations–Bloomberg Philanthropies, maybe?–decide to divest.

In Squamish, British Columbia, a Canadian town halfway between Vancouver and Whistler where the ocean meets the mountains, a startup led by Harvard physicist David Keith – and funded in part by Bill Gates – is building an industrial plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon Engineering aims to eventually build enough plants to suck many millions of tons of CO2 out of the air to reduce climate change. Its technology could help capture dispersed emissions – that is, emissions from cars, trucks, ships, planes or farm equipment – or even to roll back atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

The Calgary-based company is one of a crop of startups placing bold bets on technology designed to directly capture CO2 from the air. Lately, at least three have shown signs of progress. New York City-based Global Thermostat, which is led by CEO Graciela Chichilnisky and Peter Eisenberger, a Columbia University professor and former researcher for Exxon and Bell Labs, tells me it has recently received an infusion of capital from an as-yet-unnamed US energy company. As part of a demonstration project financed by Audi, Swiss-based Climeworks in April captured CO2 from the air and supplied it to a German firm called Sunfire, which then recycled it into a zero-carbon diesel fuel.

These companies are a long, long way from success, it must be said. Deploying direct air capture at a scale sufficient to make a difference to the climate would be a vast and costly undertaking. But their work matters because of the increasing likelihood that we will need to deploy “negative emissions” technologies like direct-air capture to avoid pushing through the 2 degrees of global warming that governments have agreed is a safe upper limit. This isn’t as well understood as it should be, in my view.

Climate science is ridiculously complicated and, as a non-scientist, I’ve struggled to make sense of the conflicting claims about how dire our situation is likely to become. Some people tell me that environmentalists and climate scientists are alarmists, exaggerating the dangers we face and squelching dissent. Matt Ridley, a writer whose work I admire, makes that argument in this excellent, in-depth podcast. Others say just the opposite, that scientists and economists feel pressure to underplay the seriousness of the problem, for fear of leading people to despair and inaction. Oliver Geden, head of research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, made this argument recently in the journal Nature, writing: “The climate policy mantra – that time is running out for 2C but we can still make it if we act now – is scientific nonsense.” Esquire magazine, of all places, published a long and powerful story last week under this headline:

When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job

Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can’t really talk about it.

The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.

The fundamental problem is that the world’s biggest GHG emitters — China, the US, Germany, the UK and India — are unlikely to stop burning fossil fuels anytime soon for a whole bunch of reasons, including, in the case of India, the fact that hundreds of millions of its poor people don’t have access to electricity. As Roberts puts it:

Holding temperature down under 2°C — the widely agreed upon target — would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There’s no sign of that happening, or reason to think it’s plausible anytime soon.

No matter what happens this winter in Paris.

Last year, in a report that deserved more attention than it got, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that avoiding the goal of 2 °C of global warming will likely require the global deployment of technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air.(For more about the need for carbon removal, here’s a good story from Brad Plumer at Vox.) Such technologies don’t exist today, at meaningful scale.